As cofounder of the iconic Dutch collective Droog, industrial designer Gijs Bakker further defined the design identity of his homeland, the Netherlands, as simple and playful, conceptual but clearly realized. He has also brought contemporary jewelry design to the fore, focusing on the principles behind the pieces as opposed to their "handmade virtuosity," Bakker recently acted as artistic director for Yii, a Taiwanese collaborative uniting traditional craft and modern design. Recently he sat down with us to answer a few questions.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, architect and University of Kentucky lecturer Mike McKay felt the pull to go down to the Big Easy to help with a task that was anything but easy: rebuilding the devastated city. He moved to Louisiana for two years to lead the architecture school's Knoa Studio, a program that tasked studios to develop designs for neighborhoods, restaurants, and the city transit system. McKay moved back to Kentucky in 2007 but his work there was far from finished.
During the storm, many of the old cypress trees in City Park and its New Orleans Botanical Garden were uprooted and the gardens were decimated. McKay's uncle, Paul Soniat, was the botanical gardens director at the time and called McKay. A local woman had donated money to build a structure for volunteers, who were the main source of maintenance for the park after the storm, and they needed a design. With very little money, very generous material donors, and a modular system that incorporated the supplies, McKay created the New Orleans Botanical Garden Duplantier Volunteer Pavilion.

Marcel Breuer’s Wassily chair, the Eames lounge chair, George Nelson’s Ball clock, and Giancarlo Mattioli’s Nesso lamp are just a few of the prodigious products that one might claim are timeless. While thousands of the objects we produce each year fall into obscurity without so much as an adieu, a select handful manages to survive and flourish with the march of time. The reasons for this are largely indecipherable—–popularity, technological advances, sales, usefulness, beauty, and whimsy, to name a possible few. The only true measure of timelessness is time itself. We asked four design minds to stake their bets on a design from the past decade that will hold up to tomorrow.

Living in a temperate climate, and deciding between a dark roof and a white roof? Trying to calculate if your summertime benefit with a light roof will outweigh the potential wintertime losses? We tweeted about this new roof tile prototype a couple weeks ago, and we're eagerly following its development.

Plastic waste is a huge problem. Single-use containers and products are clogging up our ecosystems, and the statistics are staggering: of the nearly 230 million tons of plastic the world uses annually, only about 10% is recycled, and there’s a garbage vortex twice the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean between North America and Asia. For David De Rothschild, avid traveler and founder of Adventure Ecology, a 2006 world report about the buildup of plastics in our oceans marked an ecological epiphany and the beginning of a journey to raise awareness and bring those numbers into tangible, sharper focus.